Page 60 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

Tuesday slipped through the door, gently closing it behind her. The stairwell was old, dusty, a little cobwebby. She unlaced her boots, ripped them off, and tiptoed up in her socks. And there it was: the door to Ezra’s portion of the house. Of course, it was locked.

Preemptively grinning to herself triumphantly, she swiftly and easily picked the lock with the expired Amex she used as a sharpedge to trace her liquid liner. After a few targeted wiggles of the card, she heard apop!and the door silently fell open.

It was the strangest home she’d ever seen.

The place had beautiful bones, for sure.

But there was nothing in there. It was just a collection of clean, sterile rooms, with a few nondescript chairs and a cheap pop-up outdoor table, the kind you find in the CVS seasonal aisle in summer. No art or photos on the wall, barely any personal effects. Did Ezra really live here? Did anyone? Moving fast, Tuesday lightly trotted up and down the stairs of the duplex, searching for clues, but there was barely any sign of life. A few expensive toiletries in the bathroom, a suitcase of clothes. And none of this did anything to quell her suspicion that Ezra was shady as hell.

Tuesday had told Beck she needed just fifteen minutes. She checked her phone and saw that she had seven minutes left. Now perspiring from nerves, she hustled up to the top floor to do one more sweep and realized that she’d missed a room.

Tuesday held her breath, pushing open the door.

Where the rest of the house was blankly impersonal, this room—thisoneroom—was frozen somewhere in the past. Frozen many places in the past. Like the contents of an attic in an abandoned house, it was a jumble of old relics dating from the past century. A thick layer of dust had settled on everything. There were ancient journals piled onto an old-timey writing desk, rolled-up rugs. Suits from long-ago decades, a collection of hats. There were three televisions made from wood, with tall rabbit-ear antennas. Stacks upon stacks of records were piled up against one wall.

Nearby was a tangled jumble of old, beat-up dog collars. She wondered if he was into some BDSM shit. Tuesday peered closer at the collars. Dangling from each was a rusted tin tag engraved with a name.GROUCHO BARX. DROOLIUS CAESAR. JAMES EARL BONES.

Looking around, Tuesday realized what was unsettling. While all the pieces were outdated, they were all from different eras: A 1930s Victrola, a ’50s record player, a ’70s turntable for 45s, a 2000s stereo. A Walkman, a Discman, an iPod. A slide projector, an early cable TV box, a VCR. A typewriter, a word processor, a laptop. Various retro phones, ranging from 1920s top-handle rotaries to slim push-buttons from the ’90s. In a far corner was a box of ancient kitchen gadgets, midcentury blenders and toasters, and a clunky oversized 1980s-style microwave.

It was a collision of disparate times, giving Tuesday the uneasy feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once.

And there, carefully piled on top of the writing desk, was a stack of papers. Holding in a cough from the dust, Tuesday rushed over to examine them. It was sheet music. The first paper was filled with musical notes scrawled in pencil. So was the next one. And the next, and the next. The farther she got into the stack, the older the pages became, yellowed, cracking, and the pencil marks faded with time. Tuesday couldn’t read sheet music, but even her untrained eye could tell that each sheet was different. But the handwriting was identical on every page. And each sheet had the same title—“UNFINISHED FOR HER”—followed by a date.

And the dates were impossible. The years spanned practically a century, but the month was always February. Even stranger, along the margins of every page were snippets of stream-of-consciousness thoughts that seemed to be hastily, frantically scrawled. Tuesday couldn’t make out what it all meant.

2/21/1932: More jumbled melodies.

2/16/1944: Haunted by disparate chords, adding up to nothing.

2/1/1952: February again. More mismatched sounds.

2/3/1972: Stalked by the wrong notes, again.

2/19/1984: Half-remembered, unreachable sounds.

2/11/2004: Up all night dreaming of dissonant chords. No rhyme, no reason.

2/9/2012: Music is stupid. I should’ve been an accountant.

But the top sheet read:

2/1/2024: She was there. In the garden. And I felt her there, in my bones, before I even saw her. I looked into her face and lost my composure. Like the atoms holding me together exploded outwards, in every direction. I fucking ran. But before I did… in the lightning-fast moment our eyes met… something miraculous happened. The notes in my brain started falling together. I could almost reach the melody, after all this time. But I’ll never reach her, not fully. And it’s my cross to forever bear.

Tuesday blinked, blank-faced. She was caught between confusion and a creeping sense of doom. If this was Ezra’s handwriting, he sounded like a madman. What the hell kind of trouble was Ricki in?

Tuesday whipped her phone out of her pocket and snapped as many photos as she could. And then she carefully put everything back in place and slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

But not before noticing Ali’s portrait of Ricki propped in a far corner.

Moving quietly, heart thundering, she slipped back downstairs into the tenant’s apartment. Hoisting her tote of tools, she rushed to the front door.

“I’m off to the next house, Beck!” exclaimed Tuesday. “Good luck on your midterms!”

By the time she answered, Tuesday was long gone. And Beck never realized she’d been smoothly gamed by the winner of theTeen Choice Award for Choice TV Actress, Comedy, in 2008, 2009, and 2010—who, apparently, still had it.

Della needed a dose of beauty today. She was sitting on a bench outside of West Harlem Hospital’s main entrance. The wind breezed past her, carrying the scent of leather from the shoe repair shop across the street. Della could see the narrow old shop with razor-sharp clarity, thanks to the invention of progressive lenses. So many of the newer inventions were useless, like Crocs and natural deodorant, but progressive lenses were a game changer.

At least I lived long enough for my eyes to reap their benefits, she thought.

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